Over half a century ago I grew up in Lewiston, a small town in western New York, a few miles north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. As the Falls can be seen from the Canadian and American sides from different perspectives, so can Lewiston. It is a sleepy town, protected from the rest of the world geographically, nestled at the bottom of the steep shale Niagara Escarpment on one side and the Niagara River on the other. The river’s appearance, however, is deceptive. While it seems calm, rarely making waves, it has deadly whirlpools swirling on its surface which can suck anything into their vortices in seconds.

My father, a pharmacist, owned a drugstore in the nearby honeymoon capital of Niagara Falls. My mother, a math teacher by training rather than inclination, was an active participant in the historical society. Lewiston actually had a few historical claims to fame, which my mother eagerly hyped. The word cocktail was invented there, Charles Dickens stayed overnight at the Frontier House, the local inn, and Lafayette gave a speech from a balcony on the main street. Our home, which had thirteen trees in the yard that were planted when there were thirteen states, was used to billet soldiers in the War of 1812. It was called into action by history yet again for the Underground Railroad to smuggle slaves across the Niagara River to freedom in Canada.

My parents longed for a child for many years; however, when they were not blessed, they gracefully settled into an orderly life of community service. Then I unexpectedly arrived, the only child of suddenly bewildered older, conservative, devoutly Catholic parents.

I seem to have been “born eccentric” — a phrase my mother uttered frequently as a way of absolving herself of responsibility. By today’s standards I would have been labelled with attention deficit disorder, a hyperactive child born with some adrenal problem that made her more prone to rough-and-tumble play than was normal for a girl. Fortunately I was born fifty years ago and simply called “busy” and “bossy,” the possessor of an Irish temper.

I was at the hub of the town because I worked in my father’s drugstore from the age of four. This was not exploitive child labour but rather what the town pediatrician prescribed. When my mother explained to him that I had gone over the top of the playground swings making a 360-degree loop and had been knocked unconscious twice, had to be removed from a cherry tree the previous summer by the fire department, done Ed Sullivan imitations for money at Helms’s Dry Goods Store, all before I’d hit kindergarten, Dr. Laughton dutifully wrote down all this information, laid down his clipboard with certainty, and said that I had worms and needed Fletcher’s Castoria. His fallback position (in case when I was dewormed no hyperactive worms crept from any orifice) was for me to burn off my energy by working at manual labour in my father’s store. He explained that we all had metronomes inside our bodies and mine was simply ticking faster than most; I had to do more work than others to burn it off.

Being in the full-time workforce at four gave me a unique perspective on life, and I was exposed to situations I later realized were unusual for a child. For over ten years I never once had a meal at home, and that included Christmas. I worked and went to restaurants and delivered everything from band-aids to morphine in the Niagara Frontier. I had to tell people whether makeup looked good or bad, point out what cough medicines had sedatives, count and bottle pills. I also had to sound as though I knew what I was talking about in order to pull it off. I was surrounded by adults, and my peer group became my coworkers at the store.

My father worked behind a counter which had a glass separating it from the rest of the store. He and the other pharmacists wore starched white shirts which buttoned on the side with “McCLURE’S DRUGS” monogrammed in red above the pocket. The rest of us wore plastic ink guards in our breast pockets which had printed in script letters “McClure’s has free delivery.” (The word delivery had wheels and a forward slant.) I worked there full-time when I was four and five and I suspected that when I went to school the next year I would work a split shift from 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. and then again after school until closing time at 10:00 p.m. Of course I would always work full-time on Saturday and Sunday when my mother did her important work with the historical board. I restocked the candy and makeup counters, loaded the newspaper racks, and replenished the supplies of magazines and comics. I read the comics aloud in different voices, jumped out of the pay-phone booth as Superman and acted out Brenda Starr “in her ruthless search for truth,” and every morning at 6:00 a.m. I equipped the outdoor newsstand of blue wood with its tiered layers with the Niagara Falls Gazette.

My parents were removed from the hurly-burly of my everyday existence. My father was my employer, and I called him “boss,” which is what everyone else called him. My mother provided no rules nor did she ever make a meal, nor did I have brothers or sisters to offer me any normal childlike role models. While other four-year-olds spent their time behind fences at home with their moms and dads, stuck in their own backyards making pretend cakes in hot metal sandboxes or going to stagnant events like girls’ birthday parties where you sat motionless as the birthday girl opened her presents and then you waited in line to stick a pin into a wall while blindfolded, hoping it would hit the rear end of a jackass, I was out doing really exciting work. I spent my time in the workforce delivering prescriptions with Roy, my coworker.

One thing about a drugstore: it’s a great leveller. Everyone from the rich to the poor needs prescriptions and it was my job to deliver them. Roy, the driver, and I, the assistant who read the road maps and prescription labels, were dogged as we plowed through snowstorms and ice jams to make our deliveries. The job took us into mansions on the Niagara Escarpment, to the home of Dupont, who invented nylon, to deliver hypodermic needles to a new doctor on the block, Dr. Jonas Salk, an upstart who thought he had a cure for polio, to Marilyn Monroe on the set of Niagara, to the poor Indians on the Tuscarora reservation, and to Warty, who lived in a refrigerator box in the town dump. The people we delivered to felt like my “family,” and my soulmate in this experience was Roy.

One
 
 
I would have preferred something a little more subtle, but the pink geraniums were past their prime, the leaves beginning to brown. The red ones, however, had leaves that were new and green, with clusters of buds yet to blossom. There was a limited selection of plants at the greengrocer’s, and I had walked up and down in front of the racks outside the store several times. I had contemplated other flowers this year, but for as long as I could remember, whenever my family visited the graves, they took geraniums. It was hard to know whether they had been chosen because of their low price or their symbolic value or because of superstition. Like so many rituals from my childhood, the longevity of the tradition had taken on a significance of its own, and to depart from an established way of doing things might pose a risk. We had always done it this way. And nothing bad had happened. So why change? Why risk the wrath of the gods? I picked the four best plants, and my husband put them in the back of our station wagon.
 
Michael and I had just picked up my brother Shing from his suburban home north of Toronto for the annual visit to my parents’ graves at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. On that particular day in early June of 2006, the sky was cloudless and the air in the city felt thin. I noticed that every year, no matter which day we chose for the grave ceremony, the sun shone. I no longer bothered to check the weather forecast.
 
Shing is actually my half-brother, a son from my father’s first marriage. He is a gentle man who possesses a quiet dignity. When he left China for Hong Kong in 1950, he was twenty years old. A year later, when he arrived in Toronto, a village uncle who owned a restaurant gave him a job as a waiter. Eventually he found a position at the post office sorting mail. He regards himself as fortunate to have a government pension that has given him and his wife a modest retirement. I have a photograph of him taken in the early fifties. Dressed in a pale summer suit, he is leaning against a shiny, black car, a beaming smile on his face. I once asked him if the car belonged to him or a friend. He laughed and said he had no idea who owned the car.
 
 
My parents’ plot is marked by a pink granite headstone, with their names boldly engraved in English and Chinese. Unlike the older, established part of Mount Pleasant, where the graceful canopies of tall, elegant trees provide shade and refuge, the area where my parents are buried is like a suburb on the edge of town, with sun-baked expanses of lawn, trees and shrubs not yet mature. The graves have names like Wong, Lee, Choy, Seto and Fong.
 
Shing and I had filled our watering cans at the nearby tap. Michael was crouching in front of the stone, digging two holes with a trowel. As soon as he finished, he poured water into the holes and waited for it to soak in. He then removed the two geraniums from their pots and planted them. He rinsed the gravestone with the leftover water, and with a small twig he cleaned out any moss that had grown inside the engraved characters. Lastly, he pruned the conical cedar bushes on either side of the grave. Every year my husband performed this custodial role for the graves of people who weren’t his parents while their children watched. Once Michael completed the tidying, my brother and I arranged the offering of oranges, dumplings and cups of tea on the grass. I had never been able to do this without thinking of it as a picnic for the dead. Shing then handed me a sheaf of spirit money, which he had purchased in Chinatown. Every colourful bill was printed with denominations in the millions and billions, money needed for bribing evil spirits in order to ensure safe passage into the afterlife. I stuffed the paper inside a large coffee tin while Shing made up three bundles of incense sticks. Michael struck a match, lit the sticks, then tossed the match into the can, igniting all those bills.
 
I am not a religious woman. Nevertheless, as a good Chinese daughter, I have performed these rituals every year since my father’s death—but I have never left with a sense of peace, unable to escape the fact that unhappiness permeated my parents’ marriage. No contented sighs over lives that had been filled with challenges but were ultimately well lived. It was impossible not to think about their loneliness and about my father’s sad end. After all these years, I still tasted a residue of shame in my mouth. As I watched Shing bow three times in front of the headstone, with the incense sticks still in his hands, I wondered if he was thinking the same thing. The memories that no one in my family dared to voice. I watched Shing as he jammed the smouldering incense into the earth next to the flowers. Was he also haunted by our father’s death? Or was he thinking ahead to China, a land we had not seen for more than fifty years?
 
Earlier in the year, my half-sister Ming Nee, my mother’s daughter from her first marriage, had proposed a family trip back to China that would include her, our brothers Shing and Doon—another son from my father’s first marriage—and me. Her husband was a university professor, and through his work they had travelled frequently over the years to the Far East. She had been back to visit our family in China several times. Although Ming Nee had initiated this journey home, it turned out that she would be unable to accompany us, as our needs and her husband’s schedule were incompatible. Nevertheless, her suggestion had planted an idea that my brothers and I could not ignore: we knew that the time had come for us to return. I wanted to be with my brothers for this homecoming, and the trip would also include Michael and Shing’s wife, Jen, and Doon’s wife, Yeng.
 
 
When Shing and Doon had left China, they were young men looking to the future. How vivid were those memories of growing up across the ocean? My brothers had left behind in China a sister in her early twenties and an older brother in his early thirties, each married with young children. The brother was now dead and the sister was seventy-six and widowed. The last time we saw each other, I was three. It was shocking how little I knew about these half-siblings. If my sister had passed me on the street, I would not have recognized her.
 
Shing and Doon, though, sent money to the family in China every year. They were close in age to this sister and had grown up with her in a village I had never seen. They watched out for each other after their mother died during the Second World War and their father was stranded on the other side of the world. I knew that my role in this return journey would be peripheral. They were returning to a homeland; I would be exploring a foreign country, a place of great curiosity but no real emotional attachment. My home was here. I was a happily married woman, with a teaching career that had lasted more than twenty years and had achieved some professional success as a writer. I had raised two healthy, independent daughters, the oldest married and expecting her first child. I owned my own home. I had survived my parents’ unhappy marriage and my father’s tragic death. In China I would be more like my Anglo-Canadian husband—a tourist, sitting on the sidelines, watching someone else’s momentous occasion.
 
Shing finished paying his respects and indicated to Michael and me that it was our turn to pray. I bowed three times, but I was no longer thinking about my parents. I was thinking of the deep anticipation that my brother must have felt when he first decided to make the journey to China. It was an anticipation I would never know. A twinge of envy pricked at my heart.
 
 
The food that we had set in front of the gravestone was packed away in a cooler and stored inside the station wagon, ready to take back to Shing’s house. We climbed into the car and drove across the cemetery to where Second Uncle was buried. His grave is marked by a tiny, rectangular grey stone, chiselled with just his name and date of death in Chinese characters. This area has only small, flat memorial markers, and like my uncle’s the inscriptions are all in Chinese. Every year we needed to wander for several minutes to find his marker because it was always overgrown with grass. But this year we found it quickly; Michael had remembered that there was a yew tree nearby, with a distinctive shape. Second Uncle had brought no children to the Gold Mountain, no son or daughter to honour his grave. Other than the fact that he was an older brother who had come to Canada with my father in the early part of the twentieth century, as a child I knew almost nothing about him, not even his name—and by the time my mother joined my father in Canada, this man had been dead for several years.
 
But every year Shing reminded me to buy flowers to plant for Second Uncle. I stood looking at his gravestone and thought about my parents’ resting place—their upright, shining, granite headstone proudly proclaiming their status in Canada. And yet it was Second Uncle’s humble marker that spoke the truth. I was only too aware of how sad and difficult my parents’ lives had been in this country that remained foreign to them until they died.
 
 
On April 6, 1914, the day my father and his older brother arrived in Canada, a Vancouver newspaper, the Daily News Advertiser, forecast fair and warm weather. Further down the front page, the mayor of Vancouver expressed concern about the large number of Chinese who were entering the country. He emphasized the uncontrollable temper of Orientals, proof of their unpredictability, making them unsuitable candidates for immigration. On the same day, the Vancouver Daily World carried a story from a canning mill about a Chinese worker who, after being criticized by his white foreman, picked up his superior and in a fit of anger tried to throw him into a boiling cauldron. However, the Chinaman—or “Celestial” as he was called—was restrained and disaster was averted. Compared to the white Canadians, my father and the Chinese men of his generation were small. When I discovered these stories in the Vancouver newspaper archives, it was hard for me to reconcile this portrayal of a violent, impulsive Chinese man with my docile father and others like him whom I had seen over the years whenever I visited Chinatown in Toronto.
 
I distinctly recall from my early childhood one particular customer who came into my father’s hand laundry, a giant, red-faced man who stomped through the door, stood in front of the wooden counter and banged its surface with a clenched fist until my father appeared. Waving his hand dismissively, the man leaned against the counter and boomed, “I know. No tickee, no laundree. You find, Charlie. You find.” My father untied and folded back the brown paper from package after package of cleaned and pressed garments until the man recognized his clothes. He never apologized for the extra work he put my father through. And my father never protested. Instead, he nodded his head up and down, a stiff smile plastered across his face. I peeked from behind the curtain that hung over the doorway, separating the service from the washing areas. Blood rushed to my cheeks. But the next time this man came into our laundry with his sack of dirty clothes, my father wrote a name in Chinese characters on each half of the ticket before giving the man’s portion to him. When  the man returned for his finished laundry a few days later, again without his half of the slip, my father had to unwrap only one package. The man was speechless and managed to mutter no more than thank you as he left the laundry. My father later told me that he’d written the man’s name on his half of the ticket.
 
“But he doesn’t have a Chinese name,” I said.
 
“Oh, yes, he does,” said my father. “His name is Mo Noh Suk, No-Brain Uncle. I wrote it on his ticket and inside the collars of his shirts.”
 
My father may have loathed the lowly position that he occupied in the small towns where we lived, but he never forgot it. He was meek and fearful of authority. Any anger he felt about the treatment he received from his customers and townsfolk he kept to himself. The closest he came to an act of defiance was to bestow an unflattering name in a foreign language, which he would then inscribe in black ink with a fine-nibbed pen inside their clothes. The notion that someone like my tiny father could so much as threaten, let alone attack, a lo fon and lift him off the ground, is so preposterous the thought of it is almost funny.
 
But there was, in fact, nothing funny about the way that people like my father were perceived by the lo fons of that time. The Chinese were considered to be undesirable, perhaps even subhuman. When I researched the records from the ship that brought my father to Vancouver, I found that passengers who were of European descent had specific destinations: cities like Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal; they were recognized as individuals, and as Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Roman Catholic. But the Chinese passengers were a monolithic yellow horde. Every one of them was listed as a Buddhist, and regardless of where the Chinaman stepped off the train, as far as these records were concerned, he was going to Montreal, Montreal being the train’s final stop.
 
Along with hundreds of other Chinese, my father and his older brother had travelled in steerage for three weeks across the Pacific on the Empress of Russia. They and their fellow countrymen were greeted by an embrace of warm, spring air and the sight of snow-capped mountains meeting the sky. But directly in front of them loomed tall white men, shouting and herding them off the ship. I can picture my father: head bent, wearing a dark, quilted jacket, gripping a bamboo suitcase in one hand, the other arm swinging, as he disembarked with all those passengers from China, huddled together, moving in a group. What did these two brothers who were going to wash clothes in the town of Timmins expect from this place that we Chinese called Gam Sun, the Gold Mountain? Surely they had heard from those who had returned to China about mistreatment at the hands of the white men. Did knowing these stories blunt the sting of the lo fons’ disdain?
 
My father often talked about how hard the Canadian government made it for the Chinese to immigrate. I could tell from his tone that he resented it, but at the same time, there was a sense of resignation, as if life offered no other solution. He understood his bottom-rung position in this new world and felt powerless to do anything about it. His days had become an endless cycle of laundry: sorting, washing, ironing. If there were times he might have felt rich, they were on the return journeys to his village in China, where he would have been welcomed as a Gam Sun huk, a Gold Mountain guest, whose few words of English spleen, spat out in exasperation in any restaurant, would have brought the most arrogant waiter running.
 
It has only recently occurred to me that because my father returned to China five times, he would have seen that long stretch between Vancouver and Toronto eleven times. And yet I have no recollection of his speaking about the countryside. He never mentioned the Rockies, the Prairies or even the vastness of the land itself. I remember the first time I travelled across the country by car and my sense of awe as I discovered the immensity of this place I call home. How did the white passengers react to the group of brown-skinned men dressed in strange clothes, some of them with queues down their backs? Was there hostility, indifference or both? Did my father and his brother even look out the window of the train? Were they thinking of their homeland? Or were they already preoccupied with making themselves as unobtrusive as possible?
 
 
I stood in the bright, June sunlight for a long time, contemplating Second Uncle’s small, plain stone. My husband trimmed the grass around its edge and finished planting the red geraniums. Their cheerfulness felt too forced next to the dull grey marker. In the past, whenever I had visited this grave, it had been out of deference to my brother. On that particular visit, I was overcome by my own sadness. The unending loneliness of those two men’s lives overwhelmed me. Michael put his arm around my shoulders.

Chapter 1

Woodrow Wilson Comes to Europe

On december 4, 1918, the George Washington sailed out of New York with the American delegation to the Peace Conference on board. Guns fired salutes, crowds along the waterfront cheered, tugboats hooted and Army planes and dirigibles circled overhead. Robert Lansing, the American secretary of state, released carrier pigeons with messages to his relatives about his deep hope for a lasting peace. The ship, a former German passenger liner, slid out past the Statue of Liberty to the Atlantic, where an escort of destroyers and battleships stood by to accompany it and its cargo of heavy expectations to Europe.

On board were the best available experts, combed out of the universities and the government; crates of reference materials and special studies; the French and Italian ambassadors to the United States; and Woodrow Wilson. No other American president had ever gone to Europe while in office. His opponents accused him of breaking the Constitution; even his supporters felt he might be unwise. Would he lose his great moral authority by getting down to the hurly-burly of negotiations? Wilson¹s own view was clear: the making of the peace was as important as the winning of the war. He owed it to the peoples of Europe, who were crying out for a better world. He owed it to the American servicemen. "It is now my duty," he told a pensive Congress just before he left, "to play my full part in making good what they gave their life's blood to obtain." A British diplomat was more cynical; Wilson, he said, was drawn to Paris "as a debutante is entranced by the prospect of her first ball."

Wilson expected, he wrote to his great friend Edward House, who was already in Europe, that he would stay only to arrange the main outlines of the peace settlements. It was not likely that he would remain for the formal Peace Conference with the enemy. He was wrong. The preliminary conference turned, without anyone's intending it, into the final one, and Wilson stayed for most of the crucial six months between January and June 1919. The question of whether or not he should have gone to Paris, which exercised so many of his contemporaries, now seems unimportant. From Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta to Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton at Camp David, American presidents have sat down to draw borders and hammer out peace agreements. Wilson had set the conditions for the armistices which ended the Great War. Why should he not make the peace as well?

Although he had not started out in 1912 as a foreign policy president, circumstances and his own progressive political principles had drawn him outward. Like many of his compatriots, he had come to see the Great War as a struggle between the forces of democracy, however imperfectly represented by Britain and France, and those of reaction and militarism, represented all too well by Germany and Austria-Hungary. Germany's sack of Belgium, its unrestricted submarine warfare and its audacity in attempting to entice Mexico into waging war on the United States had pushed Wilson and American public opinion toward the Allies. When Russia had a democratic revolution in February 1917, one of the last reservations that the Allies included an autocracy vanished. Although he had campaigned in 1916 on a platform of keeping the country neutral, Wilson brought the United States into the war in April 1917. He was convinced that he was doing the right thing. This was important to the son of a Presbyterian minister, who shared his father's deep religious conviction, if not his calling.

Wilson was born in Virginia in 1856, just before the Civil War. Although he remained a Southerner in some ways all his life‹in his insistence on honor and his paternalistic attitudes toward women and blacks he also accepted the war's outcome. Abraham Lincoln was one of his great heroes, along with Edmund Burke and William Gladstone. The young Wilson was at once highly idealistic and intensely ambitious. After four very happy years at Princeton and an unhappy stint as a lawyer, he found his first career in teaching and writing. By 1890 he was back at Princeton, a star member of the faculty. In 1902 he became its president, supported virtually unanimously by the trustees, faculty and students.

In the next eight years Wilson transformed Princeton from a sleepy college for gentlemen into a great university. He reworked the curriculum, raised significant amounts of money and brought into the faculty the brightest and the best young men from across the country. By 1910, he was a national figure and the Democratic party in New Jersey, under the control of conservative bosses, invited him to run for governor. Wilson agreed, but insisted on running on a progressive platform of controlling big business and extending democracy. He swept the state and by 1911 "Wilson for President" clubs were springing up. He spoke for the dispossessed, the disenfranchised and all those who had been left behind by the rapid economic growth of the late nineteenth century. In 1912, at a long and hard-fought convention, Wilson got the Democratic nomination for president. That November, with the Republicans split by Teddy Roosevelt's decision to run as a progressive against William Howard Taft, Wilson was elected. In 1916, he was reelected, with an even greater share of the popular vote.

Wilson's career was a series of triumphs, but there were darker moments, both personal and political, fits of depression and sudden and baffling illnesses. Moreover, he had left behind him a trail of enemies, many of them former friends. "An ingrate and a liar," said a Democratic boss in New Jersey in a toast. Wilson never forgave those who disagreed with him. "He is a good hater," said his press officer and devoted admirer Ray Stannard Baker. He was also stubborn. As House said, with admiration: "Whenever a question is presented he keeps an absolutely open mind and welcomes all suggestion or advice which will lead to a correct decision. But he is receptive only during the period that he is weighing the question and preparing to make his decision. Once the decision is made it is final and there is an absolute end to all advice and suggestion. There is no moving him after that." What was admirable to some was a dangerous egotism to others. The French ambassador in Washington saw "a man who, had he lived a couple of centuries ago, would have been the greatest tyrant in the world, because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong."

This side of Wilson¹s character was in evidence when he chose his fellow commissioners‹or plenipotentiaries, as the chief delegates were known‹to the Peace Conference. He was himself one. House, "my alter ego," as he was fond of saying, was another. Reluctantly he selected Lansing, his secretary of state, as a third, mainly because it would have been awkward to leave him behind. Where Wilson had once rather admired Lansing's vast store of knowledge, his meticulous legal mind and his apparent readiness to take a back seat, by 1919 that early liking had turned to irritation and contempt. Lansing, it turned out, did have views, often strong ones which contradicted the president's. "He has," Wilson complained to House, who noted it down with delight, "no imagination, no constructive ability, and but little real ability of any kind." The fourth plenipotentiary, General Tasker Bliss, was already in France as the American military representative on the Supreme War Council. A thoughtful and intelligent man who loved to lie in bed with a hip flask reading Thucydides in the original Greek, he was also, many of the junior members of the American delegation believed, well past his prime. Since Wilson was to speak to him on only five occasions during the Peace Conference, perhaps that did not matter.

The president's final selection, Henry White, was a charming, affable retired diplomat, the high point of whose career had been well before the war. Mrs. Wilson was to find him useful in Paris on questions of etiquette.